from me.
We saw them all aboard, all the ten. It was the last boat-load from the
hulk, and all the yards were manned by now, and the white sails growing
on them. Oh, but she was beautiful, the great ship in the sunshine!" The
old woman, who had spoken tearlessly, as from a dead, tearless heart, of
the worst essentials of her tragedy, was caught by a sob at something in
this memory of the ship at the Nore--why, Heaven knows!--and her voice
broke over it. To Aunt M'riar, cockney to the core, a ship was only a
convention, necessary for character, in an offing with an orange-chrome
sunset claiming your attention rather noisily in the background. There
were pavement-artists in those days as now. This ship the old lady told
of was a new experience for her--this ship with hundreds of souls on
board, men and women who had all had a fair trial and been represented
by counsel, so had nothing to complain of even if innocent. But all
souls in Hell, for all that!

The old voice seemed quite roused to animation--a sort of heart-broken
animation--by the recollection of this ship. "Oh, but she was
beautiful!" she said again. "I've dreamed of her many's the time since
then, with her three masts straight up against the blue; you could see
them in the water upside down. I could not find the heart to let my men
row away and leave her there. I had come to see her go, and it was a
long wait we had.... Yes, it was on towards evening before the breeze
came to move her; and all those hours we waited. It was money to my
men, and they had a good will to it." She stopped, and Aunt M'riar
waited for her to speak again, feeling that she too had a right to see
this ship's image move. Presently she looked up from her darning and got
a response. "Yes, she did move in the end. I saw the sails flap, and
there was the clink of the anchor-chain. I've dreamt it again many and
many a time, and seen her take the wind and move, till she was all a
mile away and more. We watched her away with all aboard of her. And when
the wind rose in the night I was mad to think of her out on the great
sea, and how I should never see him again. But the time went by, and I
did."

This was the first time old Mrs. Prichard spoke so freely about her
former life to Aunt M'riar. It was quite spontaneous on the old lady's
part, and she stopped her tale as suddenly as it had begun. The
fragmentary revelations in which she disclosed much more of her story,
as already summarised, ca